Rousing and well-informed, though a bit too impressed with itself.
The late firecracker MC gets his due in a worshipful eulogy.
For a time in the early ’90s, that loose collective of kung-fu–inspired rappers known as the Wu-Tang Clan was pretty much the best thing going in hip-hop, and the most dynamic member of the clan was Russell Jones, aka Ol’ Dirty Bastard, aka Dirt McGirt. In writing the story of ODB’s chaotic life and career, freelance journalist Lowe initially overdoes it, showing herself to be too ardent a fan. A self-described “middle-class Jew who grew up on Madonna and musical theater in West L.A.,” she writes that her interest in ODB’s morphing persona and verbal dexterities “started as a curiosity and as social currency” but later turned into a full-bore obsession. The narrative does a decent job covering ODB’s childhood in Brooklyn’s Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood and his early ascension as part of the Wu-Tang Clan’s revolutionary attack on the music world. Then it becomes as messy as ODB’s life when he spun out of control later in the ’90s, with overlapping story lines about his mental illnesses, addictions and jail time, all spiraling down to his too-early but sadly predictable death from heart failure (later ruled the result of an accidental drug overdose). Although Lowe displays an exemplary knowledge of hip-hop and ODB’s place within it, she also blows her own profile as a fan out of proportion so that, perversely, her subject shades into the background. At times, the middle-class author gets in over her head, as when she criticizes pop-rappers like Will Smith for being “so seriously deaf to street semantics.” However, Lowe’s strong and quite welcome vein of generosity toward her subject is winning in the end, particularly in describing the tragedy of a life that collapsed so spectacularly and so publicly, with few of his fans and enablers doing anything to stop it.
Rousing and well-informed, though a bit too impressed with itself.Pub Date: Dec. 2, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-86547-969-2
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Faber & Faber/Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2008
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
bookshelf
